Scree is a collaboration with long-time friend and astounding visual artist Chris Plant (aka Colour Burst). Way back in 2004 we decided we wanted to do something experimental that merged our two disciplines, and Scree was the result. An audio-visual investigation into feedback and self-governing systems, the original idea was to have minimal operator input, instead letting the designed system go where it wanted from a given starting point. It became clear early on that some control was essential to prevent (too much) spiralling feedback, but it is still a wild beast and frequently surprises with results that are entirely unanticipated.

We have performed live three times, in 2004 (for Capsule), 2007 (for Flatpack) and 2011 (for Freecode) – you can see documentation of two of those performances below. The third of these performances was notable in that it utilised a concept that is (as far as we know) still unique to this day…that of using network ‘ping’ times as a randomising factor in feedback loops (to help prevent complete self-oscillation). In other words, using the internet as the world’s biggest (and most random) delay unit!